A good glimpse into Patrick Vallance’s ambitions for UKRI here, and the model he expects the next UKRI CEO to aim for: “UKRI shouldn’t be a research council on top of the research councils. It should be a strategic organisation that is able to accommodate within it a diversity of research funding approaches. I’m concerned that a number of new and more innovative funding approaches got set up outside UKRI because it was deemed, probably correctly, that UKRI, as it was set up, didn’t have the ability to manage that diversity appropriately. UKRI is not a monolithic corporate organisation. It’s something that ought to be able to have underneath it a mix of things, and it ought to see the overall landscape and be able to understand where and how it can facilitate that. That’s the model I think we need to work for.”